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In my last post on self-editing, we explored several words and phrases that are bogging down your writing, making it unclear and overly verbose. In this post we’re going to explore what happens when you write without confidence – and how to fix that.

You want to be seen as an authority, and you want your prose – even your fiction – to be taken seriously. Therefore, you need to write with confidence. Before you even think of sending your writing out to be published or edited, go over it and ask yourself: Does my writing sound like I know what I’m saying? Does it sound like I’m looking over my shoulder, hoping for approval? Am I conveying exactly the right thing to my readers? Does my writing sound “tired”?

Conveying confidence

Conveying confidence in your writing happens by doing great research, outlining, and writing every day. Yet there’s another ingredient in the mix: believing in yourself and in your prose. You have something to say that can be told only and uniquely by you. Remember this when you feel overwhelmed and doubt creeps in.

The good news: There are concrete steps you can take in your writing and word choices that will convey to the reader that you know what you’re talking about. When you’re self-editing, look out for the following stumbling blocks that are sapping the energy out of your prose.

Seems/it would seem/apparently

The main reason you shouldn’t use too many of these words is because it weakens your writing. You sound as if you aren’t really sure about what’s going on in your narrative or you doubt your own thesis:

Based on what we’ve discussed, it would seem that it should be permissible to park in a yellow zone for five minutes only.

Be assertive; put yourself and your opinions out there. And if you really aren’t sure of the veracity of what you’re saying, look it up or do some more research:

Basedonwhat we’vediscussed, we canconcludethat you canload or unload passengers and goods in a yellow zone for five minutes only.

I’m not in love with this sentence, because it’s too bulky. There are too many verbs (see underlines) and prepositions/helping words (see blue). But it’s a start.

Let’s try to refine the sentence a bit more:

Thus, you may park in a yellow zone for five minutes only, to load or unload passengers and goods.

Sketchy historical details

How many of your are wondering what to do if you’re writing nonfiction and the research isn’t conclusive? Take a look at this (by the way, it’s purely made up):

Apparently, it seems that Napoleon might have read some of the works of Machiavelli. This is the likely conclusion based on the research of Professor A. It would appear that Professor B., however, seems to think that Napoleon could very well have enjoyed the work of Proust and perhaps based his military strategy on Remembrance of Things Past.

I actually came across a short biographical piece in the course of my work that was almost as bad as this, and I requested of the person in charge of research to make it sound a bit more definitive – even though much of the bio was indeed conjecture, and we had to retain the ambiguity.

With regard to our paragraph, this is what I think:

The words apparently, it seems, and it would appear mean the same thing, so we can delete at least one of them. In light of what we learned above, it would be best to take all three of these vague terms out.

The word might is weak. When used as a modal (as opposed to the noun, which means “strength”), it must have a verb attached to it, which is proof that it can’t stand on its own two feet and is thus a weak choice. Try to get rid of it whenever possible.

If we already have two professors fighting over Napoleon’s literary tastes, we can use them to our advantage. There is no reason to weaken the prose just because not everyone agrees about the details.

Other words to look out for: some of, likely, seems to, could very well have, perhaps.

Now that we know the issues, how can we make our prose strong and confident in spite of vague details?

Do more research

Sometimes all you need to make a paragraph stronger and more assertive is to do a bit more research.

If it turns out the evidence really is inconclusive, you will have to use some maybe-type words. However, you can structure the paragraph in such a way as to use as few as possible. This will minimize or even eliminate weak prose. Moreover, you will sound authoritative even if what you write is conjecture:

According to Professor A, Napoleon likely read Machiavelli. Professor B. holds that Napoleon probably read Proust, as he has found evidence suggesting that the famous general based his military strategy on Remembrance of Things Past.

If you find conclusive evidence, all the better; you can eliminate wishy-washy words and appear more authoritative:

According to Professor A, Napoleon read Machiavelli. Professor B., however, holds that Napoleon enjoyed the work of Proust, asserting that the famous general based his military strategy on Remembrance of Things Past.

Being assertive in fiction

Even fiction can sound weak and unassertive.

Let’s take a simple sentence: “Cathy appeared to be unhappy.” How can we make this as strong as possible no matter who’s narrating?

3rd person POV

If your novel is written in third person omniscient, there is no reason to introduce any prose that sounds as if it’s conjecture. After all, if you, the omniscient narrator, doesn’t know, who would? It’s your responsibility to Show (or Tell) the reader what you would like them to think and feel. Therefore, you’d better know whether Cathy is happy or unhappy:

Cathy was unhappy. (Tell)

Cathy closed her eyes and tears squeezed out of them. She wrapped her arms around her body, bent over by the weight of Ryan’s rejection. (Show)

If the point of view of your novel is third person limited, you have to write from the perspective of a specific character. It’s more challenging than third person omniscient, but you can still write assertively even within the parameters of the character’s personality – and even if he himself is a weak character or indecisive about an event:

Ryan figured that it was likely Cathy might be unhappy after he broke up with her.

It seemed to Ryan that Cathy was overreacting. (Tell)

Ryan saw that Cathy was unhappy. (Tell)

Ryan raised one eyebrow as he watched the tears running down Cathy’s face, her body bent and shaking. (Show)

The sentences in black give a range of possible thoughts and feelings for Ryan: conjecture, certainty, skepticism.

1st person POV

With regard to the first person point of view, it’s easy to overuse weak words or appear indecisive, as most of us – at least some of the time – carry an insecure and negative narrative within ourselves. This gets magnified when we’re ambivalent about our writing. Therefore, when drawing a character, we have to be careful not to impose our own issues on him or her.

I seemed to be unable to stop the tears from flowing.

How unhappy I was! (Tell)

I squeezed my eyes shut, yet the tears made their way out from under my lids and down my face. (Show)

I was bent over with the burden of his rejection. (Show)

One quick observation: notice how the word yet in the third sentence implies that Cathy couldn’t help her tears from falling. That is the beauty of finding just the right word. And isn’t it much stronger than: “I squeezed my eyes shut, but in spite of my great effort not to cry, the tears just seemed to start flowing out from under my lids and running down my face.”

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Notice how you can convey confidence in your writing while still conveying a researcher’s or character’s ambivalence by tightening up the text and keeping your maybe words to a minimum. Notice that especially in fiction, Showing makes it easier to write stronger sentences, no matter which point of view you’re writing from.

In the next couple of weeks, see how strong and tight you can make what you’ve written, and send your results to the Comments, below. I’d love to see your good, strong prose!

Want more self-editing? Be part of my beta course! Sign up here to be the first to find out about it (this doesn’t obligate you to join the course).

Is self-editing important? Let me answer that by telling you what happened last night.

I was washing my son’s kitchen floor (long story). I didn’t do such a great job because my granddaughter’s highchair was in the way, as were a drying rack and a basket of clean laundry.

Just as it’s easier to mop the floor when there’s nothing on it, it’s much easier for your editor – and cheaper for you, I might add – to receive a manuscript that’s already been gone over and corrected by the author. Here’s why.

If your editor has to sift through endless, verbose sentences that sound like you live in the 19th century and are going through a long Russian winter, he or she will be so busy untangling your prose that other writing issues will fall by the wayside. Unless you have your editor go over your article or book a second, or even third, time, it will not be possible for him or her to cover everything the first time around.

What’s more, if you hire a copy editor, who is supposed to look for grammar, punctuation, and other technical issues, it won’t be possible for them to do a good job if the prose is so unclear that it gets in the way of their job.

Bottom line:

You have a much, much better chance of your work being accepted if it’s, well, comprehensible.

In my last post, we talked about common writing mistakes and misused words – both of which you need to look out for when going over your book (like, 2nd and 3rd drafts). In this and the next post I’m going to go over a bunch of unnecessary words and phrases that are bogging down your writing and obfuscating what you’re really trying to say. After that we’ll tackle the technical issues all writers should check before they hand in their manuscript.

Self-editing streamlines your prose

Before you write – even at the beginning of every section or paragraph – ask yourself: what am I trying to say? What’s my point? When you finish that passage, chapter, or article and are going over it, ask yourself: Did I say what I wanted to say? Are there any words, phrases, or sentences that are not carrying their weight?

I do this when I am editing clients’ books: Is this sentence relevant? Are there any extra words that mean nothing and can be cut?

If the prose is unintelligible, I ask myself: What is the author trying to say, and how can I say it so readers will understand – while keeping true to the author’s idea and voice? I then rework the troublesome passage, in plain English.

Below are 5 writing issues that might be getting in the way of your prose.

This is…that is

There is way too much use of that in the world, and I’m on a campaign to end this scourge. Take a look:

This is the book that is generally read

There are many food processors that are manufactured with their blades made of metal

A food that is fully cooked

An egg that has been beaten

There are circumstances in which there is a student up for valedictorian, yet they may not be chosen for certain reasons.

The reason for this is that

There is the possibility that

Simplify, simplify, simplify. Here are some ideas for self-editing the above phrases – although there are many ways to skin a cat (but who would want to?), so you’ll probably be able to come up with a few ideas of your own:

This book is generally read

Many food processors come with metal blades

A fully cooked food (notice there is no hyphen between fully and cooked)

A beaten egg

Sometimes a student is up for valedictorian, yet for certain reasons they are not chosen

The reason is that… or This is because

It’s possible that

In the first example, context might demand you use “this is the book,” but think carefully before you go for it. One scenario I can think of would be “This is the book I was telling you about.” However, you wouldn’t need to say “This is the book that I was telling you about.”

To be

Simply put, the infinitive to be is not always necessary; it’s a big fluff phrase and a quick self-editing fix:

How old do you have to be to be considered an adult?

Start writing even if you don’t know what the conclusion of the story is going to be

He is considered to be an exceptional and strange case

Nothing will happen if we delete the extra verbiage:

At what age is one considered an adult?

Start writing even if you don’t yet know the story’s conclusion

He is considered an exceptional and strange case (and try not to say “considered as“)

Be able to

Generally, you will not need to tack this complex combination of words onto another verb. Many times you can use can instead. Alternatively, if you must use “be able to,” delete or simplify other verbs in the sentence. For instance:

1. It will only be able to be eaten when it’s cold.

Try “It can be eaten only when it’s cold” or “You can eat it only when it’s cold” or “You’ll be able to eat it when it’s cold.”

2. It’ll be months before she’ll be able to try to go back to school.

Way, way too many verbs here. First of all, I’d encourage the writer of this sentence to consider whether the subject of the sentence has to try to go back to school, or if they can just to go back. If they don’t have to try, then the writer could say: “It’ll be months before she’ll be able to go back to school.” Notice I’m using “be able to,” but I’ve just deleted an unnecessary verb so I’m giving myself a reward.

Now let’s try to take out “be able to.” The author could say: “It’ll be months before she can go back to school” or “It’ll be months before she can even attempt to return to school.” I don’t love this last sentence, but it does the job if the author insists that she needs to try to go back to school, and can’t merely return without trying.

Passive case

Sometimes, using passive case when unnecessary sounds pompous – and sometimes it’s just plain confusing. Take this sentence: “A light cannot be left on to see in the dark.” It’s both incomprehensible and poor writing. Moreover, who or what is the subject of the sentence?

If I were editing this sentence, the first thing I’d do is determine its point. Furthermore, what does it mean to see in the dark – wouldn’t it be easier if you turned on a light?

Okay, let’s say we’ve figured out the author’s intention. We are now in a better position to either delete or rewrite. For argument’s sake, let’s rewrite:

“If you’re looking out your bedroom window in the dead of night, you won’t be able to see the stars if you leave a light on in your room.”

Notice:

1. I used “be able to,” as here it works and doesn’t feel overly verbose.

2. I’ve also added a subject, i.e., you.

3. I’ve made the sentence active case.

4. I’ve chosen to lengthen the sentence for the sake of clarity, whereas in other examples in this post I’ve shortened the sentences for the same reason.

When you really need passive case

Sometimes you really do need passive case, for instance if you intentionally want to obscure the subject of the sentence. However, there’s passive case and there’s passive case. What’s easier to understand: “The parking rule was violated unintentionally” or “The parking violation was unintentional”? Both are passive case, but only one sounds good.

The use of/is used

Like “to be able to,” the verb use is over-used (ha ha). The following are real-life examples from my freelance editing projects – although I’ve changed nouns and verbs to protect my clients’ privacy:

Employ the use of force

This phrase is used to describe the event

Guys: just say it! Your words will be so much more powerful:

Employ force

Use force

This phrase describes the event

To be continued…

In my next post I’ll be continuing with self-editing tips. And if you’d like to explore self-editing in depth and over the long term, be sure to get yourself on the waiting list for my beta course in self-editing here. (There is no obligation to join the course if you join the list.)

Let me know in the Comments if there are other self-editing issues you want to know about!

I keep a list of writing mistakes that I come across in my own freelance editing business as well as in the modern, “good trash” I like to read for fun. In this post, I’ve chosen 17 frequently misused words and expressions. Learn them, and you’ll jump to the head of the pack.

There will be people who don’t agree with what I am about to present, but that’s okay; I’m sure they’ve been wrong before.

Seriously, though, there is some wiggle room with some of the expressions, and I’ve noted this.

Myriad

Guys, it’s myriad without the “a” in front and the preposition in back, e.g., “She had myriad boyfriends before she settled down,” and not “She had a myriad of boyfriends before she settled down.”

Although nowadays, using “a myriad of” is lazily accepted, purists like me will never allow ourselves or our clients to use it, and certainly someone who uses myriad correctly shows themselves to be a sophisticated writer.

Whence

Similar to myriad, you don’t need any extra words before and after you use whence. It already means “from where,” so just say whence – do not say “from whence.” Here’s an example:

“I sent the perfumed love letter back to the woman whence it came.”

Yeah, I know; it’s not like you want to sound like Shakespeare when writing for Playboy magazine, but it’s important to know this rule in case you want to get fancy in a novel or memoir.

A word of warning: you will find legitimate writers using “from whence,” but be smug: they’re wrong.

Wherefore

Another Shakespearean word, but just in case you take a time machine back to the sixteenth century, you’ll need to know that wherefore means “why.” It doesn’t mean “where.”

Come vs. cum

Come means “come,” like “I come home at three o’clock. Cum is Latin, and means “with” or “together with.” You pronounce it “koom.”

While come is self-explanatory, cum isn’t. Here are two ways it’s used:

in expressions such as summa cum laude (with highest honors – get it? Laude is like laudatory)

to describe entities of a dual nature, such as “novelist-cum-soldier of fortune” or “gangster-cum-rap artist” (notice the dashes between words and the use of italics). And by the way, “rap artist” is my favorite oxymoron.

Lead vs. Led

Lead is either a present-tense verb (pronounced “leed”) or what you put in pencils (pronounced “ledd”); led is a verb, the past tense of lead. Here’s an example:

“Please lead me to the lead pencil department, because using wax pencils has led me to tear out my hair in frustration.”

Wet vs. whet

A baby wets his diapers, and when his mother heats up the Gerber strained carrots this whets his appetite.

The word whet, by the way, means to sharpen; thus: “He whet the lead pencil with the blade of his wet Swiss Army knife.”

Might vs. mite

You wouldn’t believe the mistakes you find in Kindle books. I once read, “He was a might too strong for her.” I am not making this up.

In brief: Might either means strength (noun) or is used to express a conditional situation. In grammar parlance it’s called a modal or auxiliary verb (might, may, must, can, could, shall, should, will, would).

I know it doesn’t look like a noun there, but most grammar pundits hold it’s a noun, while some insist it’s an adjective. In keeping with my policy of painless grammar, however, I say: “Who cares? Just use it correctly, for goodness’ sake!” (And notice how goodness needs an apostrophe here.)

Pour vs. pore vs. poor

You can pour lemonade or pour out your heart.

Before you subscribed to Bulletproof Writing, you would pore over your grammar textbook while sweating from every pore of your skin (yuck).

This is because you used to have poor grammar skills.

Desert vs. dessert

The word desert can be that hot place with sand dunes, or it can be a derivative of the word deserve, as in “You got your just deserts,” i.e., just what you deserve.

The emphasis is on the first syllable in desert the sandy place, and it’s on the second syllable in “just deserts.”

Dessert is that decadent chocolate thing the waitress brings you at the end of the meal.

An easy way to remember how to differentiate between desert and dessert is that dessert is sweet, and therefore needs an extra s.

Pain vs. pang

I originally wanted to say that pain is physical while pang is emotional, but that doesn’t completely work.

On the one hand, you have a pain in your jaw when someone hits you with a left hook (physical), and you have pangs of regret when you say No to that decadent chocolate dessert the waitress brought you (emotional).

On the other hand, if you were a hobo during the depression, you might have a lot of painful memories (emotional) of constantly experiencing hunger pangs (physical).

Birth vs. berth

Many husbands want to give their wives a wide berth when the latter are giving birth. Perhaps these men will book a berth on the next cruise to Alaska.

Born vs. borne

Children and goats are born; their mothers have borne them. Usually the human mothers have borne a lot of aggravation while raising their children (but it’s all worth it :).

Precedent vs. precedence

At yesterday’s meeting, you set a precedent for giving precedence to the most senior member of your club.

And by the way, what you did was without precedent in the club’s history.

Incident vs. incidence

When you got home from the meeting, however, you reported a robbery incident that took place at your house. You’re pretty upset about the increasing incidence of crime incidents in your neighborhood.

You’ve got another think/thing coming

If you think that what I’m about to say is wrong, you have another think coming.

DO NOT think that you can use the expression “another thing coming.” It is wrong.

I don’t care if Prof. Google says it’s okay. He also says you can say alright instead of all right and alot instead of a lot. No, no, no.

Remember: the word think can be a noun sometimes, as in “I’ll have to give your marriage proposal a think, Caligula.”

And if Caligula thinks she’ll say Yes, he might just have another think coming.

Worst/worse comes to worst

I have always hated it when people used “worst comes to worst”; how can something come to the same thing?

“Worse comes to worst” makes so much more sense! After all, it’s a progression. Remember the superlative in Mad Libs? Bad, worse, worst. You go from bad to worse, and from worse to worst. Finito.

But.

You apparently are allowed to say “If worst comes to worst.” This is what it means: The worst possible situation in theory comes to the worst possible situation in practice.

Now I can give those who use “worst comes to worst” the benefit of the doubt. Still, personally, I don’t like it. It reminds me of “another thing coming.”

For all intents and purposes

If you click on the above link, you will discover that Merriam-Webster uses “for all intensive purposes” as their definition of an eggcorn; we’re twins! Wikipedia and I are, too.

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New course!

What other embarrassing mistakes have you seen in the books you’ve read? I’d love to compile a list; especially since I’m thinking of giving a course in self-editing.

Interested in the course? Then click here and I’ll put you on the waiting list. I’m offering a beta version at a reduced price to a limited number of people. The beta course will include hands-on stuff with me and interaction with the other students, and you’ll be helping to shape my flagship alpha course.

In my last post we discussed the 5 grammar rules that Merriam-Webster decreed we’re allowed to break.

But what if you absolutely must break a grammar rule – or, for that matter, any writing rule – in order to serve your readers’ best interests?

In this post I’ll be exploring some authors who broke the rules, and why what they did absolutely works.

And to whom we’re all indebted for their magnificent prose.

A review of the rules

Don’t use adverbs

Never use passive voice

Use only said in dialogue

Omit needless words

Do not use colloquial language

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The following is a passage from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella, The Valley of Fear:

“I am inclined to think—” said I.

“I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently.

I believe that I am one of the most long-suffering of mortals; but I will admit that I was annoyed at the sardonic interruption. “Really, Holmes,” said I severely, “you are a little trying at times.”

No doubt you’ve noticed that Conan Doyle violated grammar rules 1, 3, and 4. He also did a lot of Tell.

Here’s how the novella might have opened had he followed the rules:

“I am inclined to think—” said I.

“I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes said.

I am pretty patient, but I was annoyed at the interruption. “Really, Holmes,” said I, “you are sometimes difficult.”

What do you think? At best, my version lacks color. At worst, well, it might have just ended up in the slush pile. Here are a few more issues Conan Doyle would have come up against if he paid heed to all the rules all the time:

Anyone who’s read Sherlock Holmes knows that terse, sarcastic language is an integral part of his character. Thus, if Conan Doyle didn’t allow himself to use adverbs such as impatiently,” he would have had to write something like, “Well, then, man, do so!” which would have been totally out of character for Holmes.

The verb “remarked” is certainly better that “said” when Holmes speaks impatiently and sarcastically. Subtle verb choices can describe a character quickly and concisely.

If Conan Doyle had written the third paragraph the way I rewrote it, he wouldn’t have violated the “needless words” rule. However, the phrases “I believe that” and “I’ll admit that,” along with Watson’s use of understatement, highlight his humility.

The words sardonic, severely, and a little add color and character to Watson’s conversation.

Pawky means “matter-of-factly humorous,” but wouldn’t it sound strange for Holmes to say, “You are developing a certain unexpected vein of matter-of-factly humourous humour, Watson”? Or even “matter-of-fact humor”?

O. Henry

O. Henry is another rule-breaker. His prose is filled with colloquialisms, and he has an amazing ear for dialect. But if he decided to follow the rules and omit colloquialisms, what fun would his stories be?

Take this passage from “The Handbook of Hymen”:

I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that emanates out of your organs of conversation. The kind of half-masticated noises that you emit every day puts me in mind of a cow’s cud, only she’s lady enough to keep hers to herself, and you ain’t.

Imagine what it would be like to read this instead:

I’m so sick of your constant chatter; you don’t stop talking all day. Even listening to water drip into a pan would be better than listening to you.

O. Henry’s brilliant piece of colloquial dialogue not only gets the point across, it describes the personality, education, and present situation of the character better than any Telling can.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Foer, the author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated, is a classic rule-breaker whose prose simply works. He experiments with words, structure, punctuation, dialogue, dialect, and plot. Here’s an excerpt from his latest novel, Here I Am, where he writes one of the world’s longest sentence since James Joyce’s Ulysses. It is describing the new house a suddenly single husband and father has just moved into:

It was a nice, if slightly less nice, version of his old house: slightly lower ceilings; slightly less old and less wide planked floors; a kitchen with hardware that if it was called bespoke was called that by Home Depot; a bathtub that probably leached BPA, and was probably from Home Depot, but held water; melamine closets with nearly level shelves that performed their function and were nice enough; a faint, not-pleasant attic smell filling the atticless house; Home Depot doorknobs; middle-aged, rotting sub-Marvin windows that served as visual thresholds rather than as barriers against the elements or sound; walls wavy with uncharming trapped moisture; ominous peeling at the corners; subtly sadistic wall colors; unflush light switch plates; a faux-porcelain Home Depot vanity with wood-grained melamine drawers, in a bathroom the color of discharge, whose toilet paper roll was out of reach of anyone who wasn’t imported from Africa to dunk without jumping; ominous separation everywhere: between the molding components, between the crown molding and the ceiling, the floor molding and the floor, separation of the sink from the wall, the mantel of the nonfunctioning fireplace from the wall, the unflush electrical plates from the wall, the doorframes from the wall, and more-plastic-than-plastic Home Depot rosettes from the jaundiced ceiling, the floorboards from one another.

It’s messy and all the elements run into each other, as every component of Jacob’s life is smashing one against the other.

The recurring word slightly conveys how things are supposed to stay “normal” for Jacob’s kids, but something is a bit off.

There are many contrasts to Show the house’s ugliness and fake furnishings, betraying the reality behind the upbeat front Jacob and his soon-to-be ex-wife are trying to show the kids (bespoke-Home Depot, faux-porcelain, sadistic-wall colors, non-functioning – fireplace, jaundiced-ceiling).

The word separation means more than merely a poorly built house.

Would this work all through the book? Probably not. Could you get away with it sometimes? Probably.

Merriam-Webster debunks the rules

Last year, I came across this article on the Merriam-Webster website, that august arbiter of spelling and grammar rules (according to the Merriam-Webster website). The article discusses five writing rules you are allowed to ignore nowadays.

I don’t agree with everything said in the article. And strangely, by debunking grammar rules, its author perforce made up new ones. This leads me to believe all the more strongly: Don’t rely solely on gurus. Use your common sense.

Here are the five rules Merriam-Webster no longer agrees with:

Don’t use adverbs

Never use passive voice

Use only said in dialogue

Omit needless words

Do not use colloquial language

Let’s explore each one of these now-debunked rules.

1. Don’t use adverbs

I do agree with this piece of advice, but I also believe in balance and logic. For instance, you could write:

No one is loyal to their employer nowadays; employees wander from one corporation to another, ready to jump ship anytime they’re offered another few thousand dollars.

Not bad, if I do say so myself. But what if you wrote:

When it comes to employee loyalty, workers behave peripatetically; no corporation is sacred.

It’s concise, to the point, and cute. And it would be allowed on Twitter.

Furthermore, if one’s loud laugh was not the point of the story and you had to get the information out as quickly and concisely as possible, would you want to write “His laugh reverberated in our eardrums, causing temporary deafness” or “He laughed loudly.”? (Or perhaps, “He cachinnated.”)

2. Never use passive voice

Although in general you should use active voice, sometimes you need the passive, as using the active would sound stupid:

Nike has brought this commercial to you.

The travel bug bit Ellen.

Sometimes, keeping in mind who or what is the “star” of the sentence can help you decide whether to use the active or the passive voice. For instance, the second sentence, above, is about Ellen and not her travel bug, so it would be best to make her the subject: “Ellen was bitten by the travel bug.”

Another example

Here are two sentences I found on the University of Toronto’s “Writing Advice” site:

“The sodium hydroxide was dissolved in water. This solution was then titrated with hydrochloric acid.”

Not only does it sound weird, it’s probably scientifically incorrect .

3. Use only “said” in dialogue

Use your common sense with this one. Occasionally using a dialogue tag other than said can make for a richer reading experience, and can help you express yourself more precisely (did you notice how the adverb precisely helped you understand my point more precisely?).

Sometimes (BTW, sometimes is usually an adverb), there simply isn’t time for you to Show; it’s easier to Tell readers the mood, tone, or situation with a dialogue tag:

“Get me out of here!” he rasped.

In my opinion, this is a much better sentence than

“Get me out of here!” he said in a strangled voice.

On the other hand, if you used a different dialogue tag each time someone spoke, it would get weary for the reader:

“Where are you,” she asked.

“None of your business,” he replied.

“Yes, it is my business; I’m your mother,” she said.

“But I’m 37 years old,” he persisted.

“Tell me whom you had dinner with,” she probed.

“You’re very nosy,” he remarked.

4. Omit needless words

Sorry, but this one stands. Here’s a handy chart with examples from my own clients and possible fixes. (I’ve changed the words and subject matter to protect the authors’ anonymity, but the basic sentence structure is the same.):

Unless you’re Dostoyevsky, please have a little respect for your reader’s time and intelligence, and make your prose as tight as possible. You can still be as creative and descriptive as you want.

For more on omitting needless words – plus more examples – see this previous post of mine. (And coming soon: a new post on writing mistakes, including being too wordy.)

5. Do not use colloquial language

I actually agree with this one in principle. I find the [bad] use of colloquial language – and I include dialect in this – at best embarrassing and at worst insulting.

I’d also caution you with regard to slang, not only because it sounds weird and presumptuous if you don’t get it right but, as The Elements of Style cautions, “By the time this paragraph sees print, uptight, ripoff…vibes, copout, and funky will be the words of yesteryear.”

Here are a few more gems from The Elements of Style relevant to the use of colloquial language (summed up by me):

If you must use a colloquialism, just use it without drawing attention to it with quotation marks or italics.

Do not use dialect unless your ear is good, and be consistent with it.

No idiom is taboo, no accent forbidden; there is simply a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course.

Bonus piece of advice from George Carlin

The late, great comedian George Carlin said that when you’re imitating someone, instead of worrying about getting the voice right, concentrate on the content that would fit the person you’re imitating. Carlin used Ed Sullivan as his example: he parodied the acts that played on The Ed Sullivan Show instead of trying to get Ed’s accent right.

The same holds true for dialect and colloquialisms: don’t worry about getting the 2018 teenager right; just Show us the attitude and behavior. And unless you’re sixteen, don’t use words like twee.

***

So what do you think? Do you agree with Merriam-Webster? Why or why not? Should language change with the times, or should it be monolithic? And what other grammar “rules” would you like to see changed?

A while ago, one of my readers asked me to discuss the perfect tense: present, past and future. I’ll discuss them a bit, and then give you a bit of visual learning with three handy charts I created. And here’s how you can get them delivered to your inbox!

Yes, send me the Perfect Tense ebook!

Just fill out your email address and click on the pretty orange button

I just got back from a walk. It’s not easy getting up at 6:00 am and going out in the cold, wet air, but I have a walking partner waiting for me at the corner and I can’t let her down. I must stick to the schedule.

Do the same thing in your writing: get a partner and set a schedule when you will write and when you will call or Skype each other. You won’t be able to let each other down.

No friends? Make a date with yourself, and start writing!

Tips and tricks for memoir-writing

It sounds uninspiring, but….

Just start.

Yup.

Starting means sitting down and writing. Those who choose to outline first can count it as their daily writing.

Remember that the first six minutes or so might be slow and painful, but keep at it. It’s best to have a daily quota of either words or minutes. (Personally, I think it’s imperative; that’s how I keep up with my blog-writing.)

Organizing your life is helpful, too. Read my post on motivation here, my post on setting boundaries and making a schedule here, and my post on writer’s block here.

Outliners

Make your outline as detailed or as general as you want. If you don’t already have your angle and/or goal, delineating the events you are going to write about might help.

As I said in my post on writer’s block, “Outlining is powerful because it allows you to employ stream-of-consciousness, or what some people call a brain dump, which is much less stressful than ‘real’ writing. Very often after outlining, your piece will write itself.”

Here’s a fake outline I made as an example:

Non-outliners

Even non-outliners might want to decide on an angle, a goal etc.; others will choose to jump in, writing down vignettes, giving it structure once a pattern emerges. (Check out what my subscriber Bracha has to say about this with regard to her recently published book, in the Comments of my last post.)

Here’s one of my favorite quotes from William Zinsser’s On Writing Well (emphases mine):

Write [the first day] about some event that’s still vivid in your memory. It doesn’t have to be long…but it should have a beginning and and end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. [The next day] do the same thing.

Keep this up for [several] months. Don’t be impatient to start writing your “memoir” – the one you had in mind before you began….One day, take all your entries out…and see…what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about – and what it’s not about….what’s primary and what’s secondary, what’s interesting and what’s not, what’s emotional, what’s important, what’s unusual, what’s funny, what’s worth pursing and expanding. You’ll begin to glimpse your story’s narrative shape and the road to you want to take.

Then all you have to do is put the pieces together. (pp. 293-4)

Writing the memoir

If you’ve been doing your Method Writing regularly, you will already have a treasure trove of chapters, scenes, and vignettes to include in your memoir. Keep up the Method Writing every day, and you’ll find yourself with a first draft.

If you don’t engage in Method Writing, start “free-associating” about your life. Images will run through your brain. If you have too many images running around, write down the basics and then produce your chapters one by one.

What’s going on in your life now; are there any nuggets to write about? Does anything going on now dig up an old memory? Can you describe the memory and how it ties in with the present?

Your life as a tapestry

Take an inch a day and write about it. Anne Lamott, for instance, suggests in Bird by Birdto write about school lunches. What can they tell your readers about how you interacted with your friends, and how do they reflect your fears and insecurities?

I can clearly recall the dynamics in the cafeteria at my elementary school and in the eating space at my junior high; I have plenty of material for an entire chapter on school lunches alone. For instance, I remember the tension right before lunch, hoping I wouldn’t have to eat alone, and feeling such pity for those who did.

Expanding out…

If you choose, you can expand a scene you’ve written about. My piece on school lunches, for example, can include what my friends and I did to relieve the boredom after we had finished eating but the bell hadn’t yet rung to go back to class. I can record some of our antics, such as reconnoitering the halls in order to not get caught wandering in the “forbidden zone” by a teacher. Or the day I was caught for breaking some rule and was sent to the girls’ vice principal’s office. My social studies teacher, Mr. Mandelson – he of the motorcycle and tight jeans – “coached” me regarding how to handle the fateful appointment…

From here I can segue into a discussion on teachers in general, on having a crush on a teacher (not Mr. Mandelson), and on being an adolescent. From there I can transition to peer relationships in general, especially among a gaggle of giggly girls and their cattiness, jealousies, and general unpleasantness.

…and zeroing in

As Lamott says (pp. 36–38), sometimes an otherwise “trivial” memory will spark a desire to write about a minor character in one particular vignette. Perhaps mentioning my trip to the girls’ vice principal will lead me to writing about feminism, or how the idea of each gender’s having its own vice principal is unheard of nowadays. Or how it must have felt being a black, female vice principal in the early 1970s in a mostly white school.

Make sure you Show. Generally, you don’t have to say “I felt humiliated” or “My feelings were badly hurt.” Instead, for instance, you can describe your cheeks burning, that funny feeling in the pit of your stomach, the tears in your eyes, not wanting to go to school the next day etc.

Pro tip: Don’t worry if your first draft is “garbage” (it’s not called an SFD for nothing). To begin with, it’s not; I promise. Furthermore, the most important thing at this point is toget everything down. Let your memories and imagination guide you. Afterward, you can cut and filter as needed.

Getting sued

Most people writing memoirs are worried about friends and relatives being angry if they are written about in a negative light. Those who choose to publish, however, have another thing to worry about: being sued for libel.

The truth is that most of us aren’t important enough for someone to go as far as hiring a lawyer and going to court. However, if you are really worried about this, you can do what Anne Lamott suggests in the last chapter of her book.

***

In my next few posts we’ll be returning to both grammar and other writing techniques, but for now I hope you’ve learned the basics of memoir-writing in these last four posts.

I’m excited to announce that I will be offering a new course on – you guessed it – memoir-writing! Fill out the form directly below and you’ll be the first to know about it when I launch. I’m offering a pre-sale incentive, too.

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Let me know in the Comments which part of my memoir-writing series you got the most value from. And as always,

This was supposed to be a 3-part series, but due to the popularity of memoir (and also because I have so much to say about it), I’m adding a fourth post, due in two weeks.

In this post we’ll talk about the benefits of writing memoir and how to write one.

Benefits of memoir-writing

1. Insight and empathy

First and foremost, writing your memoir will give you insight into yourself. It will help make sense of your life, your choices, and your motivations. It might also help you understand the major people in your life, such as your parents, your siblings, and other family members. Putting it all down on paper gives perspective; you’re able to see events from above, one degree removed. You might even engender empathy for some of the “villains” in your life. Think how cathartic this can be. (See my posts on Method Writing and writing in longhand for more on this.)

Furthermore, as Anne Lamott says, “Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion” (Bird by Bird, p. 225).

And this leads me to another benefit of memoir: it’s good for your “other” writing.

2. Grist for a novel

Even if you don’t choose to publish, or even share, your memoir with anyone, it might gift you an unsought benefit – grist for a novel. Writing down your life gives you a greater understanding of the rainbow of human emotions, allowing your fictional characters to be more human and real.

However, you need to be honest and descriptive when writing about the people in your life; well-drawn characters are no less essential when they’re real people! This can become great material for short stories, novels, and even nonfiction.

Now, I don’t mean that you should write a novel about your evil Aunt Mary, “disguising” her as Aunt Mary Ann while giving your fictional character the same exact personality, physical features, and life script as your aunt. I mean that once you explore Aunt Mary through your writing – her deeds, her childhood, her marriage, her possible motivations etc. – you will have a richer, more well-rounded, and therefore more insightful perspective on which to base a character in your next book.

In other words, it doesn’t matter if Aunt Mary is white, blond, American, and fat; you can draw, sympathetically and realistically, the character of a Latin American, black-haired, brown-skinned, and skinny priest with some of Aunt Mary’s personality traits. You don’t even have to spell out Father Luiz’s childhood traumas or the motivations behind his present actions; it will all be there in your prose, and in the way you have shaped his character, thanks to exploring your aunt through memoir-writing.

3. Posterity

I will end this section with an excerpt from Anne Lamott which gives us another, more intangible benefit of memoir-writing:

There is…something to be said for painting portraits of the people we have loved, for trying to express those moments that seem so inexpressibly beautiful, the ones that change us and deepen us….Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs…even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child…to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done….you have put it down on paper, so that it won’t be lost. And…maybe what you’ve written will help others, will be a small part of the solution. (Bird by Bird, pp. 192, 235)

How to write a memoir

“If you make an honest transaction with your own humanity and with the humanity of the people who crossed your life, no matter how much pain they caused you or you caused them, readers will connect with your journey.” (William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 287)

Remember that the most important thing about writing memoir for others to read is to make it easy for them to identify, if not with you then with your themes and insights. As I said in my previous post, keep in mind that your readers’ attitude of “What’s in it for me” is human nature.

1. Tell the truth

Writing memoir is decidedly not for the fainthearted.

As Elizabeth Gilbert says in her epigraph to Eat, Pray, Love, “Tell the Truth, Tell the Truth, Tell the Truth.” I cannot begin to describe how incredibly important this is. If you can’t tell the truth about a specific event, don’t include it in your memoir.

There are bestselling memoirs that are so gritty and honest that they’re unappealing, or at least difficult to read. Stephen King, however, in his magnificent OnWriting, was able to pull off one of the grittiest and most explicit memoirs that you’ll still love to read. King leaves nothing to the imagination, with nauseating descriptions of his early life and unsentimental Showing and Telling of his teens and adulthood. Add to this his alcoholism, drug addiction, and crippling car accident. You will need emotional fortitude for this book, but it’s a must-read.

Notice how King turns a book about the writing craft into a memoir that makes him human and allows the reader to identify with the person giving the advice.

In a nutshell, here’s what Stephen King does:

He reports without moralizing. The reader is allowed to figure out his or her own emotions and reactions to the story.

He’s painfully honest, without getting carried away with lots of adjectives and adverbs that spoon-feed the reader.

He’s vulnerable. King writes about painful things, and although he does it without moralizing, he still allows his emotions to show.

He knows his goal, his theme, and his angle. The events King writes about in his memoir serve his goal of teaching the craft of writing and are not a mere retelling of his life.

2. Structure wisely

You can and should outline your memoir so it won’t become a tangled mess of random events and self-serving opinions. As I mentioned in the first post of this series, you need to decide the angle, i.e., from which perspective you are writing; which relatives, friends, and other characters you are going to write about; the period of time your memoir will cover etc.

Explore the tapestry of your life in little bitty pieces, as I promote in Method Writing. Think vignettes, not a blow-by-blow of your life (i.e., autobiography), and not necessarily in chronological order.

When I was working on a biography for an indie publisher several years ago, I took all the raw prose, examin

ed it from a bird’s-eye view, and found the perfect (if I may say so) way to structure it.

The book was the author’s memoir as much as it was a biography; it was ostensibly about a maverick female Polish educator and the impact she had on her students. The author was a former student who observed things from the outside; she wasn’t one of the inner circle.

I could see that the book would best be structured in terms of themes instead of straight chronology, and so we divided it into thematic sections, within which we followed a (very) loose chronology. I cut and pasted some vignettes into other sections.

In short, the author wrote and I figured out the structure. For those of you who don’t like to outline, this could be an option: write now, structure later.

3. Don’t look over your shoulder

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past….If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. (Bird by Bird, p. 226)

Don’t try to be a “writer.”…Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. (On Writing Well, p. 283)

Be brave; get it all down, don’t try to be Hemingway, and don’t worry what your mother will think. Be real, worry about editing later.

Here are two pieces of advice from Zinsser that will help you stay focused and prevent you from trying to write for others’ approval:

Tackle your life in manageable chunks.

Don’t visualize the finished product.

A final word

Try to read several memoirs (even unpublished, if possible) before you start. I wouldn’t suggest reading anything resembling a memoir while you’re in the middle of writing yours, because you might be influenced by the author(s).

Pick up an autobiography or two, and notice the differences between that genre and memoir.

Remember: No self-pity, and no whining. Report the events, try to keep it more Show-y than Tell-y – but of course you’ll have to Tell sometimes. If you’re real and vulnerable, your audience will identify with you and your story.

In my next and final post on the subject of memoir, I will give suggestions for actually sitting down and starting. And I’ll also discuss literary techniques and devices to incorporate into your memoir.

Please let me know in the Comments which memoirs you’d recommend. It would be great to start a list!

When I was in the fourth grade, our teacher, Mrs. Lynch (whom you met in this post) brought up some topic for class discussion. In the middle of the session, Susan raised her hand and started speaking about summer camp. She spoke for what must have been ten minutes. Try to imagine forty 9-year-olds listening to this girl go on and on about herself and her little friends sitting around a campfire.

What strikes me is that I remember being embarrassed for Susan more than bored. No one was interested in her and her camp experience – and she was completely off topic. Finally, Mrs. Lynch put her out of her misery and asked her to stop.

Memoirs are the same: you must stay on topic, you must say something that interests the readers, and you must be honest without making a fool of yourself.

Especially if you’re writing to publish.

Writing to publish

If you’re writing a memoir with the intent to publish, you have to treat it as a serious nonfiction piece. Yet it needs to be interesting and readable, like a novel.

As with writing for yourself or family, you still can’t write looking over your shoulder, because then the prose will be stiff and affected. Pretend you’re writing for an audience of one – yourself – and the memoir will come out more authentically.

Here’s some brilliant advice from Fred R., whom you met in my last blog (emphasis below is mine):

I’d studied a few autobiographies, some “How to books” and blogs about how to write creatively. Writing anything someone might read to the end would take far more effort than I had imagined…to compose an autobiography, the techniques of narrative fiction are the key – with the distinction that one possesses the immutable plot. But there lies the dilemma of the memoirist – delivering a page-turner out of real life experience is hard work, to which I add the warning: no invention allowed, and check your facts (if a scene describes a moonless night sky and the reader knows when, google the phases of the moon for that date).

Make it universal

As Fred attests, publishing a memoir is no easy feat. And you must face the fact that no one wants to hear about you. Let me explain.

William Zinsser writes that you must get readers to identify with the idea behind your story, and apply it to their own lives. He gives a wonderful example of playing with a mechanical baseball game as a child in the 1930s.

Most of us have no idea what a mechanical baseball game is – much less have ever played with one. Zinsser’s writing about the experience and taking the time to describe how he felt playing the game as a child, and the yearnings and memories this brought up, makes the game itself fade into the background and allows the reader’s own memories of a cherished childhood game to come to the surface. In fact, when I read this particular passage in Zinsser’s On Writing Well, I immediately thought of the Monopoly games my family played as a child, and how they reflected family dynamics.

What’s in it for readers?

By contrast, think back to “sensationalist” autobiographies such as Mommie Dearest or Soft Pretzels with Mustard (in the running for world’s worst book), or any of a number of autobiographies “written” by sports figures or ex-presidents (beware when the author’s name is followed by “with John Smith,” which means Mr. Smith wrote the book after interviewing the famous person a few times). They don’t deserve the name “memoir,” as they are merely ego-fests, tell-alls, or both.

Sometimes a private memoir will become an accidental autobiography, such as A Fortunate Life by A. B. Facey. Originally, Facey wanted to print just twenty copies for his family, but its universal appeal made it a smashing commercial success.

Make it relatable

If you do choose to publish your memoirs, keep in mind you will still have to tell the truth, warts and all. This is not for the fainthearted. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashesand Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Clubimmediately come to mind. I didn’t love those books, mostly because they were too raw for me. In fact, I had to put The Liar’s Club down after a while; I simply couldn’t cope with it.

On the other hand, Mary Karr was stunned with the overwhelming response to The Liar’s Club from readers who had gone through similar experiences she wrote about. Many women said they felt she was reading their mind, that the book was healing for them. Karr, like all successful memoirists, was able to make her story both universal and uniquely hers.

To sum it up:

Your audience won’t care about reading your memoir unless there’s something in it for them. You can do this by telling the truth and making your memoir relatable.

Choose an angle

When writing your memoir, you obviously can’t record every single thing that ever happened to you – especially if you’re way past middle age. (Can you imagine listening to Susan now? She’s in her fifties.) Furthermore, you must choose an angle.

Take Frank McCourt, for instance. In Angela’s Ashes he tackles his early life, with his mother as the focus. His second memoir, ‘Tis, discusses his young manhood, marriage, and family life. And in Teacher Man he uses his childhood and early manhood as the foundation for the story of his teaching career. Teacher Man spans both periods covered in McCourt’s first two memoirs, but focuses on a different aspect of his life.

Another classic example of this is James Herriot’s superb All Creatures Great and Small series. His books overlap the time periods they cover, yet he recalls different memories in each volume, allowing us to see the big picture from different angles.

Chronology

Something else to consider when structuring your memoir is chronology. Let’s say your angle is the influence of your family on your personal life. Do you want to start with your childhood and segue through your teens, young adulthood, middle age, and beyond? Or do you want to report specific events in your life and tie them to others? Do you want to begin with your life now, and touch upon related events in earlier years? The possibilities are endless.

Your memoir can jump (or amble) between past and present. Suppose you’re a teacher and you’d like to focus on your teaching life. How about not only reporting vignettes from the classroom, but also scenes from earlier years that influenced your career choice, as well as the choices you made that were influenced by your career? This is one way to give your memoir depth.

Perspective

Are you writing from the perspective of a child or an adolescent, or are you writing as the adult you are now and looking back? It’s important to choose a perspective for your memoir, which will give it the proper voice and tone. It will also influence what you will write about.

The best proof of the efficacy of angle, focus, and perspective is the amount of repeat memoirs from the same author. James Herriot and Frank McCourt are not the only ones who wrote multiple memoirs; not by a long shot. Helen Hanff, one of my favorite authors, didn’t stop with her famous 84, Charing Cross Road. She focused on other parts of her life with Q’s Legacy, Underfoot in Show Business, and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. Each are a unique and worthwhile read. They’re well written, funny, and heartbreaking all at the same time.

***

In my next post we’ll be exploring the benefits of writing a memoir as well as how to write one. In the meantime, if you’re considering writing one yourself, how are you going to make it intensely personal while ensuring it’s interesting and valuable to readers? Which part of your life are you going to focus on? And how will you be telling it: Chronologically or by “subject matter”; from the perspective of a child, a teenager, or an adult?

Recently, I confessed to writing up, over thirty years ago, some short vignettes about my life and getting a less-than-enthusiastic response from a friend to whom I showed it. That scared me away from writing about my life.

But memoir-writing is hot nowadays, not only because people want to become famous and/or make lots of money, but because they want to have some piece of immortality, for family and friends or just for the universe in general.

I think memoir-writing is a fantastic way to get perspective on your life: to see the many connections between events, to understand what has shaped you both for the good and for the bad, and to put to bed old grudges and disappointments.

What is memoir?

Simply put, a memoir is a set of vignettes about your life, with a major theme or angle.

It is NOT autobiography, which is more of a blow-by-blow of your life.

It is very important to distinguish between the two, as this will affect how you tackle your project. In fact, understanding memoir is so important that I’m going to repeat myself:

Memoir is NOT autobiography

Goals of memoir-writing

To tell a story. Whether or not you choose to write for an audience or just for yourself – and whatever your genre or style – remember: Your task is to tell an interesting story. To quote this article from the BookBaby blog: “Leave out inconsequential events and keep in mind that you’re building a story, not just making a list in the order things happened.”

To tell the truth. Since your goal is to tell the truth, remember that the truth is “funny and sick and therefore true….We write to expose the unexposed….What gets exposed is not people’s baseness but their humanity” (Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, pp. 188, 198, 200).

While you don’t have to go right out and tell your readers in black and white what your goal is in this memoir, you must have it personally in mind before you write.

Questions to ask yourself before you start

The first and perhaps most important thing you need to do is to figure out why you are writing this memoir. You must be perfectly honest with yourself. Here are some questions to ask:

Will this memoir be just for myself? For a general readership? For family and close friends? For just my family? Will it be for my nuclear family only, or for the greater family?

Will those reading it be adults? Youngsters? A specific, niched audience? This will impact the way you write (tone), the order of the chapters, your angle (childhood, career, marriage, etc.), the words you choose – everything.

Is my goal to publish, to give my family a chronicle of my life, or to understand my life and my choices? Or will this memoir be an act of healing for me?

Am I writing this memoir to get revenge on people, or to settle old scores (not recommended)?

If I allow others to read it, will I be able to stand up to their criticism and anger? (If not, consider writing only for yourself.)

Pro tip

No matter whom you are writing for – even yourself – you must not write looking over your shoulder, wondering what your audience will think and/or trying to write flowy prose with an eye to writing the next bestseller.

Don’t write a memoir if…

You think you’re a special snowflake whose story everyone wants to read. Anne Lamott tells how she submitted a story to a magazine, only to have the editor write her this rejection letter: “You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has happened to you is interesting” (page 193).

By the time she sat down to write a book about her father’s final illness, she had learned her lesson:

First I wrote down everything that happened to us, and then I took out the parts that felt self-indulgent. (p. 193)

You can’t stand to cut and edit. Unless you’re writing only for yourself, you’ll need to do both of these – just as you’d do with a “real” book. One of my subscribers, Fred R., whom you’ll hear more about in my next blog, cut the first half of his memoir from 290,000 words, “with detail galore, strewed with countless irrelevancies and wanderings-off,” to 80,000 words.

Writing for yourself

Writing a completely private memoir is the easiest, as you don’t have to edit excessively and you don’t have to worry about anyone being offended. It’s therapeutic, too. Force yourself to face the bad with the good; get it all onto the page. It’s illuminating to see the continuum of your life in black and white. Pieces of the puzzle will come together, and your comprehension of events will be enhanced.

With regard to traumatic or humiliating events, you might find yourself understanding them from a different perspective, leading to forgiveness of yourself and others.

To quote William Zinsser:

Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance – not what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation affected you and shaped the person you became.” (On Writing Well, p. 293)

Writing for family

Writing for family is a whole different kettle of fish. Here are four reasons why.

Reason #1

You’ll have to decide just how much you’re willing to reveal about yourself – but whatever you decide, you must tell the truth.

Reason #2

They’ll be interested in family history as well as in you. Try to give as much information about your forebears as possible. Zinsser suggests, “When you write your family history, be a recording angel and record everything your descendants might want to know” (On Writing Well, p. 286).

While I agree that if you’re writing for your family you will have to give cold, hard facts, remember that everyone loves a story. This is as true in nonfiction as it is in fiction. Your family will especially want to read anecdotes from your life that will give them a comprehensive and interesting picture of you.

Reason #3

You don’t have to be as “author-y” as you’d need to be if you were writing with an eye to publish – but why not give it your best effort anyway?

Reason #4

It might be more difficult to write just for family than for the public, as you won’t be able to escape into anonymity. You might pull a few noses out of joint, and you yourself might be embarrassed.

Nevertheless, get the story down first and then worry about the possibility of hurting people. “Don’t look over your shoulder to see what relatives are perched there” (On Writing Well, p. 286).

Caution!

Don’t write in an effected style, and don’t pretend you’re Hemingway, Dickens, or even Elizabeth Gilbert. It will only make you sound pompous. Write from the heart, and it will enter your readers’ hearts.

***

In my next three posts, we’ll cover writing a memoir with the intent to publish, choosing an angle, the benefits of writing memoir, the nuts and bolts of writing memoir, and more.

In the meantime, start thinking about jotting down some old memories and impressions – even if you have no intention of writing a memoir. What events have shaped you? Influenced you for good or for bad? Do you recall those events from the perspective of a child or an adult (either one is legitimate)?

Let me know in the Comments whether you’ve ever written a memoir or considered writing one. For those of you who have written something, what’s one piece of advice you can give us? For those who are considering writing one, what events or subjects do you want to focus on? What’s preventing you from starting?

Hi, I’m Deena Nataf

I’m a book and journal editor with thirty years of experience in the field. If you write to publish, I want to help you get that first draft written, that manuscript finished, and that book out the door. If you write for yourself, I’ll give you the tools you need to write clearly, write regularly, and write in your own voice. But no matter why you write, I’m passionate about helping you make your mark on the world.